Pay No Attention to the Demagogues Behind the Curtain!

A few days ago, MSNBC regulars/Bulwark mainstays gathered to talk about... stuff.  As with most of the beats I've appointed myself to cover, I scan this stuff quickly or I listen with half and ear and if I detect anything of general interest, I bring it back to you all.

The topic was the "O morels, o tempura" "O tempora, o mores!" reaction to the 2,900 Shitler Youth texts that has been widely bruited about in the past several days.  Much of it was so far out into the weeds of acidic Young Republican ("YR") goss that I could barely make out the tops of their heads bobbing through the thick wingnut insider undergrowth.  But everyone agreed that it was all so bad and sordid.  

And then they did that Bulwark thing where, of course, they must hang onto their Centrist and barely-former Republican subscribers by wagging a warning finger at us irresponsible Liberals because it is incumbent on both sides to "police their own".

TIM MILLER:  And and it is incumbent on people to self-police their own side to prevent this from happening or any or can spiral out of control. There's nothing like inherently beautiful about believing in big government versus small government that makes you less susceptible to being attracted to tribal violent thinking.

And I think that some people on the Left think that there is.

And you've seen very violent political movements, as JVL wrote I think very well earlier this week, coming from basically every ideology imaginable. So like it is incumbent among people to ... to resist it with [inaudible]

Then, having perfunctorily performed the "Burn a candle at the altar of Both Siderism" ritual to mollify  their Centrists and barely-former Republicans, Miller immediately negated what he had just said so as not to piss off the Bulwark's center-left subscribers too badly.

MILLER:  I'm... I was not accusing.  I know... you're ... I know you agree with me on this Sarah. 

But there just wasn't near enough meat on the bones of this loose, "J'accuse...!  Just kidding!  Maybe not!" meandering to make for a post...

...until Tim began thumbing his suspenders and talking about, "Well, y'know, back in my day..."

That's when my ears perked up, because once again Miller had to ride that fine line between not alienating Liberal subscribers who damn well knew something was askew in the Republican heart long before Trump showed up, and his elderly Conservative subscribers who wanna hear more Mona Charen and more Charlie Sykes and who get their Edmund Burke panties in bunch and pitch  "David Brooks circa November 2007, 'History and Calumny'"- level fits of indignant indignations at the scurrilous suggestion that there was even a hints of a wisp of a whiff of racism going on inside the GOP before Donald Trump showed up and ensorcelled the entire base of the party. 

So, to keep both sides of his subscriber base mollified, Miller again split the difference.  Sure, there was some racism, and we all knew it, but it was all behind our facade of respectability so, y'know, uh...where was I going with this?  

Also, pro-tip:  You can tell when millennial Never Trumper's know they're dancing through a minefield of bullshit by the sudden spike in the use of the word "like".  For example

MILLER:  Like, again it wasn't as if there weren't racist jokes in young Republican groups in 1996 or 1976. Like, there were. Obviously. Like there there's an element of this always. But, like, the culture of, like, encouraging it and and almost, like, if you don't participate that means you're the bad one. It's a sign of weakness, right? 

The culture of drawing people into this based on that, right?  Like that they're ... like that that the thing that they're leading with on the front of the pamphlet is, like, we hate Mexicans and we're going to make nasty cruel racist jokes and, like, we y'know believe in America first and and white Christian nationalism or whatever.  Like, that being the first page of the pamphlet versus you know, like, the first page of the pamphlet being free markets and free people and, like, we also have some people here that write in the letters to the editor that's... write that stuff like that's not good either, like, you know what I mean but,  like, it's difference. It is a it is a huge difference.

Professional media communicator, ladies and gentlemen.  

But I, like, digress :-)

This is where the Never Trumper narrative/origin story always falls apart. Or, rather, would fall apart if they were ever cage-matched with anyone who wasn't a fanboy, which is never going to happen.  

First, Tim, have you ever asked yourself why, if there were was obvious racism going on in the Republican party as far back as 1976 or 1996 -- if it was so god damned persistent and ongoing and everyone knew it  -- why no one in your party was "policing" it?  Who was supposed to be in charge of that?  Lee Atwater?  Karl Rove?  Tom DeLay?  

Why was no one policing senator Jesse Helms?  

Or senator Strom Thurmond?  

Answer:  Because "policing" racism in the modern GOP was never a "This is not who we are!" rebuke, but merely a "We'd rather you not wave your Confederate flags where the public can see." political tactic.  How else could Trent Lott have made it all the way to the office of Senate Majority Leader and not known how heaping public praise on America's most famous segregationist would trigger such a public gag reflex that it effectively ended his political career?  From The New York Times:

Lott's Praise for Thurmond Echoed His Words of 1980 

Trent Lott, the Republican Senate leader who faces mounting criticism for his comment last week that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948, expressed a nearly identical sentiment two decades ago.

After a fiery speech by Mr. Thurmond at a campaign rally in Mississippi for Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Mr. Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd in Jackson, ''You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.''

Last week, in remarks he later characterized as spontaneous and a poor choice of words, Mr. Lott repeated his opinion about Mr. Thurmond, who ran for president on a Dixiecrat platform opposing ''social intermingling of the races.''

At the party for Mr. Thurmond's 100th birthday, Mr. Lott said: ''I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.''...

The problem with racism in the Republican party was never a few young Republicans working in the National Review mailroom telling racist jokes.  

The problem with racism in the Republican party was Richard Nixon and his henchmen starting an active campaign of recruiting Southern white bigots into the GOP.  

The problem with racism in the Republican party was Ronald Reagan running for president promising to bring "welfare queens" and "young bucks" to book for stealing the tax dollars of hard working white voters, and inviting prominent Southern white bigots like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the party's inner circle of influencers.  At which point, the party's road to Hell and Donald Trump had become pretty well paved and marked.

This was the point at which any "policing" Republican bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny became impossible, because the party had now become dependent on the largess of a loud, racist scumbag who Never Trumpers would very much appreciate you and I never mentioning again.  

From The New York Time in December of 1994, when Tim Miller was just 13 years old.

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

...To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November...

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

This is where the fairy tales Never Trumpers spin about the history of their Republican party falls apart, because during the adult lives and careers of every Never Trumper you know, all of their party's electoral successes have been dependent on the votes of angry, paranoid bigots and imbeciles, and every one of them damn well knows it.  

If they had ever been genuinely serious about "policing" their own, they would have grabbed Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators (including Charlie Sykes) and Fox News and all the rest by the metaphorical collar and belt and thrown them out of the party.  But since that would be electoral suicide, that never happened.  Instead, the GOP leadership contented itself with outsourcing the work of angrying up the bigots and imbeciles and getting them to the polls to Conservative media ... and then colluding with the legacy media to pretend that the base deeply cared about deficits and marginal tax rates and "free markets and free people", and Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators and Fox News and all the rest were really marginal, irrelevant players.  

Pay no attention to the demagogues behind the curtain!

Except both the party elite and their wink-and-a-nod propagandists like Charlie Sykes all made the same catastrophically delusional blunder over and over again until it was too late.   They came to believe their own bullshit.  

They went right on believing that they were the party and that, however rage and conspiracy drunk the base became, the base could always and forever be relied on to do what they were told.  That the base would willingly go right on being merely a means to the one end the party elite actually cared about: tax cuts for the wealthy.  And that while the Conservative media kept the base on side by feeding them the most violent, hateful, deranged nonsense about Democrats decade after decade, the party elite could still cut deals and talking about bipartisanship because everyone knew it was all kabuki.   

But a party -- any party -- is nothing more than its membership, and its members believed the crazy.  Craved the crazy.  Demanded ever heavier doses of the crazy.  Which is how, very quickly, Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators and Fox News and all the rest became bigger than the party.  Big enough and powerful enough to dictate terms.  Which is why the last public attempt by anyone in party leadership to "police" the madness running wild inside the party came to this humiliating end.

From Politico,  March 2, 2009:

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”...

On Monday night, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine called on Republicans to “stop following divisive figures” like Limbaugh.

“I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’” Kaine said in a statement. “However, Chairman Steele’s reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama’s agenda in Washington.”

In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”...

By the time Trump showed up, the respectable, public face of the party had long since become brittle, paper-thin "respectable" chrysalis inside of which a huge, fascist-ready monster was just waiting for someone to come along and set it free.  A Potemkin facade which Very Serious legacy media pundits and elite Conservatives defended as the "real" Republican party until it was way past too late.

And once it all blew up in their face, as we Liberals had been warning them for decades it would, a handful of them got run out of the party and became the Never Trumpers who are now employed by some of those very same legacy media outlets to hector Democrats about how we don't understand politics and how we're doing it all wrong.   

I don't know about you, but I don't take motoring advice from self-proclaimed "driver's ed instructors" whose sole qualification is that they drove drunk and reckless for decades, smashing into things I cared about over and over again, until, at last, they finally wrapped their own car around a tree and are now insisting on using mine.  

Burn The Lifeboats